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Understanding Instagrams founding story and more from SXSW

Each week, Extra Crunch members have access to conference calls moderated by the TechCrunch writers you read every day. This week, in addition to Zack Whittaker’s discussion about a complicated university grade-hacking case, Josh Constine reported from Austin where he attended SXSW. While at SXSW, he interviewed the founders of Instagram, Kevin Systrom and Mike […]

Apple ad focuses on iPhones most marketable feature privacy

Apple is airing a new ad spot in primetime today. Focused on privacy, the spot is visually cued, with no dialog and a simple tagline: Privacy. That’s iPhone. In a series of humorous vignettes, the message is driven home that sometimes you just want a little privacy. The spot has only one line of text […]

Twitter launches its first podcast, Character Count, focused on its ad business

Twitter today is joining the podcasting arena. This morning, the social network is launching its first-ever podcast series with a new show focused on Twitter’s advertising business, which it’s calling “Character Count.” The company says, for now, it’s testing the waters with five already produced episodes of around 25 to 30 minutes in length. It […]

AWS announces new bare metal instances for companies who want more cloud control

When you think about Infrastructure as a Service, you typically pay for a virtual machine that resides in a multi-tenant environment. That means, it’s using a set of shared resources. For many companies that approach is fine, but when a customer wants more control, they may prefer a single tenant system where they control the […]

Daily Crunch: Telegram soars after Facebook outage

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here. 1. Telegram gets 3M new signups during Facebook apps’ outage In a message sent to his Telegram channel, founder Pavel Durov wrote, […]

Twitters new prototype app twttr launches today

Twitter’s new prototype application is rolling out to the first group of testers starting today, the company announced this afternoon by way of a tweet. The app, which Twitter is calling “twttr” as a throwback to its original name, was first introduced at the CES conference this January. It aims to offer Twitter a more […]

Apple sends out invites for March 25 special event

Apple sent out invites to reporters this afternoon for a March 25 special event at the Steve Jobs Theater in Cupertino. Reports have suggested that the company will focus its keynote on the content side of its business. The invite offers some pretty heavy-handed hints that the video content service will be on full display […]

XRP is the latest cryptocurrency to hit Coinbase Pro

On Tuesday, Coinbase announced that XRP will be the latest cryptocurrency to hit its pro-level trading platform. Coinbase Pro will allow users to transfer XRP to the platform right away (“After 10am on February 25”) but there will be at least a 12-hour delay before trading is enabled. Support for XRP will be available for […]

Who are the next billion users and what do they want?

Entrepreneurs and tech executives are widening their gazes outside of developed nations for their next source of growth. Ubiquitous cheap phones and increasingly affordable phone plans such as Jio in India are helping another billion users join the internet. What do those users want though, and how are they the same and different than existing […]

Instagram prototypes video co-watching

The next phase of social media is about hanging out together while apart. Rather than performing on a live stream or engaging with a video chat, Instagram may allow you to chill and watch videos together with a friend. Facebook already has Watch Party for group co-viewing, and in November we broke the news that […]